With a groan, I coax her body upwards, my hands on her hips, my hiss a counterpoint to her cry as I bring her down hard. As our bodies collide, need floods my veins, heady and sweet. My hands cup her ass, rolling her beneath me, the movement as easy as the rolling tides.
Is the feeling in my chest relief? Whatever it is, I’m greedy for it as I kiss her again and again, my cock still seated deep within, our soft sighs and moans an expression of hard need. As I withdraw, we both give a taut moan at the sensation, her thighs pressing my hips as though to hang on to it. But I’m not going anywhere as I anchor myself to her, our fingers twisting, hands pressed into the bed.
‘Je t’adore. Je suis amoureuse de to.’ I begin to build a slow, easy rhythm, lost to the tide of her body pulling me in.
‘Tell me,’ whispers my soft-eyed supplicant.
‘I adore you. I’m in love with you.’ I fuck my promises into her, this thing between us building into something wild and frenetic. My need to possess her is overwhelming. She cries out as I go deep and whimpers when I deliver shallow thrusts, hungry for it all, raising her hips as she meets me thrust for thrust.
My cock throbs with need, her cries reaching a crescendo as I begin to pump and flex, fucking her harder and harder as though I could make her feel my love this way.
In one crystalline, brilliant moment, my mind empties. This moment, the feeling of her around me will be forever burned into my memory and my skin. I’m lost to all but the pound of my heart, the throb of my release, and the latent pulse of hers.
* * *
Tu me manques, I type into my new phone, the old now sitting at the bottom of the marina, I suppose. I miss you.
I miss you, too, comes her almost immediate response.
Then you should be here with me. Looking after me. Tending to my fevered brow.
You don’t have a fever.
That’s besides the point.
Or else you’d be back in the hospital. Probably with pneumonia. And a chest drain.
Rose, come home. I can’t help but smile as my thumbs slide over the phone. Home. Come home to me.
I’ve got to work. You know that.
You work for me. Your time would be better spent here with me. For the good of the man you love. For the good of the company.
Bossy AF. Her reply is accompanied by an angry faced emoji.
Tu me manques more properly means you are missing from me. When you’re not with me, it’s like a piece of me is missing.
Sickened by my own neediness, I throw my phone across the sofa, the message unsent. This is the first day since my accident I’ve been left to my own devices. Left to myself. Left to my own thoughts since Rose went to work.
C’est ridicule—it is ridiculous that I’m effectively paying her not to be here with me. But I promised I wouldn’t interfere, and as she so solemnly pointed out this morning, I’m not currently a resident of Wolf Tower . . .
‘Aren’t I?’
‘Nope,’ she’d said, stepping from the circle of my arms to finished getting dressed for work. ‘You’ve got to live there to benefit from the services.’
‘But I am the owner.’
‘Stop looking at my ass,’ came her reply as she caught me doing just that.
‘If I’m no longer a resident there, what is my residency status here? Am I your guest? Your housemate? Vivre en amoureux?’
‘What was that last one?’
‘Your live-in lover.’
She’d turned as I’d answered, her feet now secured. She’d walked back to the side of the bed, clad in only her panties and heels, and wrapped her arms around my neck.
‘Do you always get dressed so tangentially?’
Her lips had quivered as she tried to restrain her smile. ‘I was trying to distract you from the fact that I have to go to work.’
But we both knew she was going nowhere for quite some time as I’d rolled her between my body and the mattress.
‘Nice to see you’ve got a smile on your face.’
Rhett pulls me from my daydream, my smile slipping not as a result of his interrupting my reverie but rather because I realise I was daydreaming.
Imbécile.
‘Are you camped out at this place indefinitely now?’
‘Until she asks me to leave,’ I reply, realising she hadn’t truly answered my question about my status here.
‘Who asks you to leave? Have you given the house back to your mother?’ Dropping the paperwork Paulette requires signatures for, his hands grip the back of the sectional sofa as he frowns down at me.
‘No, I gave the house to Rose.’
‘Jesus, can I not leave you alone for five minutes?’
My ribs ache as he drops to the opposite end of the sectional sofa, jostling me, my aches exacerbated by the rigours of sex. Something I have no intention of telling Rose.